Yes, it’s one to save for posterity all right. We’re going to save it at mindsports.nl in any case. I’ve asked Pascal to agree with Thnikkaman on a final move (humanwise). Nice to see an odd result in the standings :)

It’s been a long time since I played Havannah here, so I forget- are players able to propose and accept a draw? It seems more than a little inconvenient that you would have to fill the board, especially since the outcome was clear many moves earlier.

You might want to post a position around move 75 or thereabouts, when it became clear the game was a draw. The ‘filling in’ stage was only required to force the system to a result. An option to offer a draw would have made that unnecessary.

That’s a remarkable game. I would’ve been 99.9% certain that a draw was impossible on a base-8 board. Christian is right, too: the only draws I’ve ever noticed on this site have all been on very small boards, and when both players were bots:

It occurs to me that it’s worth having a better player than me ask what the last move that isn’t definitely best was. For instance, 72-75 are part of the same drawing sequence. Each move is forced. So while the draw becomes obvious at 75, it is assured before then.

On size 4 there is a forced draw after 4 moves or so, but not from an empty board. There are certainly winning and losing opening moves on bigger boards, but it’s possible there are also some moves that lead to a draw. It’s actually quite likely that both of you were in winning positions at some point in the game, though it’d be so many moves from the end that it’s unlikely that we’ll ever have the cpu power to prove it.

It wouldn’t necessarily be surprising if optimal play was a draw. At least with the swap rule, it is surprisingly plausible, since if there is any move from which you can force a draw, that is the best move for the first player, even if draws are very rare in normal play.